Best Performance-Driven Digital Campaign

HCL Technologies Ltd. for Recruiting CIOs through the Social Network

The Campaign

The CIO Straight Talk community (http://straighttalk.hcltech.com/community/cio-straight-talk ) is an exclusive group of CIOs and other senior IT leaders, specifically designed for the dynamic exchange of peer-to-peer professional insights among members that will provide solutions to their technology and business challenges, advance their careers & drive business results for their organizations.

The challenge was to onboard relevant audience i.e. CXO, VP & Directors across target industries & to acquaint them with the community. The community was built in February, 2016 thus the task was to make the TG aware of the platform & get quality registrations by doing focused promotions.

Since the target audience was really niche, a strategy was needed with which one could ensure that the users see the ads more often on different social media platforms so that they can make an informed decision. Also, to ensure that the ads are targeted to the right audience since any spillage could bring negative impact on HCL as they could not recruit any members on the platform other than CIOs, VPs IT & Director IT.

The Idea

As per B2B Marketing Benchmarks, 90% of the social traffic to Blogs & Sites is driven by LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter, with half of it coming from LinkedIn alone. Therefore, LinkedIn was chosen as the primary platform for the promotions since it provides the requisite Job Function & Seniority targeting which isn’t available on other social platforms and there are about 1Million+ CIOs, VP IT & IT Directors who are active on LinkedIn globally.
HCL planned to execute the campaign in three broad phases on LinkedIn.

For the first phase, all CIOs, VPs & Directors were targeted globally through Spotlight Ads, Sponsored Updates & Sponsored Inmails (the complete product mix available on LinkedIn in order increase our per-user engagement).

In the next phase, the focus was restricted to select target geographies viz. US, UK, France, Sweden, and Germany while other targeting components remained the same.

Finally, for the last phase, CIOs, VPs & Directors from Major Industries (Like Manufacturing, Public Services, Life sciences & Healthcare, Finance and CPG) with Company Size of 10,000+ employees were targeted. This three-tier targeting was planned to ensure a diverse member base onto the community.

Furthermore, a remarketing list was created for each of these phases capturing cookies of all the users/visitors who did not convert/registered for the community. This remarketing list was later used to target the Non-Convertors on Facebook & Twitter. Facebook & Twitter were chosen as secondary platforms for promotions due to Facebook & Twitter both don’t Seniority & Job Function targeting which was a pre-requisite for this Campaign.

Spotlight Ads were first time used to drive recruitment to a community that is off LinkedIn, most spotlight ads are run to drive followers on platform properties only like Company Pages etc. On Sponsored Updates HCL only promoted the high-quality articles that were published on the community to give users a glimpse of the nature of CIO Straight Talk platform while Spotlight Ads & Sponsored Inmails were curated to drive registrations.

The Result

The CTR of LinkedIn Spotlight Ads was 0.34% which is 209% more than the Industry Benchmark of 0.11%.

The InMail Campaign had achieved an open rate of 62% which is 51% higher than the average industry performance of 41%.

The campaign had CTR of 23.88% which was 234% more than the industry benchmark of 6.5%.

The conversion rate for Inmails was 26% which 420% more than the LinkedIn conversion benchmark.

Marketing & advertising as an Industry had a highest open rate of 56% followed by financial services with an open rate of (50.9%)

The average Engagement rate for LinkedIn Sponsored Updates was 0.54% which is quite above the industry benchmark of 0.41%

The overall conversion rate of the LinkedIn campaign was 21.14% which is way above the Industry average of 4%.

On Facebook, the overall CTR of the campaign was 0.19% & we were able to convert 12% of dropouts.

On Twitter, the CTR of the campaign was 0.12% and we were able to recruit 26% of dropouts.

The overall cost per lead for this campaign has been $40 which is way too low compared to CPL & CPA’s from other Lead Gen platforms for a premium level audience where the cost hovers between $100- $150.

By the end of the campaign, we were able to recruit 30% of the total reached Targeted Users.

Key Outcomes

• In just two months, HCL was able to increase the community members by a whopping 2194.4%.

• 15% of members recruited were from Forbes G2000 organizations, a focus client base for HCL.

• Almost 60% of the CIO Straight Talk group members were successfully ported to the CIO Straight Talk community

#mCube 2018 #MCL

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